I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being fashionable or successful.
In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.
My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York.

Soon after graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), Andy Warhol (1928–1987)  moved to New York City and immediately found assignments for the fashion magazines. His work debuted in Glamour in September 1949, with drawings of fantastical shoes that launched his career as one of the most successful illustrators of the 1950s. Warhol had a unique, whimsical style of drawing that belied its frequent sources: traced photographs and imagery, which he drew in ink with a quavering line, then blotted to create a uniquely recognizable style.

Serendipity 3, a trendy restaurant and ice cream parlor located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was a place where Warhol sometimes exhibited his work. He often held parties there--his friends could gorge themselves on the restaurant’s signature “frrrozen hot chocolate” while helping Warhol hand-color his self-published artists’ books.

Self-Portrait (Passport Photographs, one with Altered Nose), 1956. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc

Before he began making art that looked like advertising in the early 1960s in a studio he named "The Factory," Warhol was one of New York’s most successful advertising illustrators. In a 1963 interview, he said, “I was getting paid for it, and I did anything they told me to do. If they told me to draw a shoe, I’d do it, and if they and if they told me to correct it, I would. I’d have to invent [things] and now I don’t; after all that correction, those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have style….The process of doing work in commercial art was machine-like, but the attitude had feeling to it.”

Warhol’s early drawings for fashion magazines, ads, and album covers are now collected in a charming little book. In addition to his many drawings of fantasy shoes, made for Glamour, there are fashion illustrations, horoscope drawings with text done in a script style he adopted from his mother, Julia Warhola, pages of butterflies, and several adorable cats. A drawing of a hand holding a few little flowers is inscribed, “thank you for being so nice.” The book offers a glimpse of the young artist before he had cultivated the highly stylized persona of an art world phony.

Andy Warhol Drawings is the latest in a series of fun Warholia from Chronicle Books, including the Andy Warhol Idea Book, and the Andy Warhol Pop Box.

In the 50^th anniversary year of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, a number of exhibitions have been organized:

Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, closing December 31. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82^nd Street, NY, NY.

Warhol: Headlines defines and brings together works that the artist based largely on headlines from the tabloid news. Warhol had a lifelong obsession with the sensational side of contemporary news media, and examples of his source materials for the works of art are presented for comparison, revealing Warhol's role as both editor and author. Closing January 6.The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, PA.

Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal opened yesterday at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, where it continues through March 31, 2013.

The Prints of Andy Warhol opens June 8, 2013 at the Munson-Proctor Art Institute, Utica, NY.